Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
-
Hi!
My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage.
I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud.
Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
-
believe I found a hint
opensiteexplorer linking pages: limboland.net
| *.limboland.net/
| Top Linking Pages | Page Authority |
| http://business.limboland.net/factoring/delaware_llc/delaware_llc.html | 29 || 39 | 281 |
Anchor text linking to some page on https://www.delawareinc.com/
| your story heidi lowe gallery,1,6 |
Query Google if the phrase with myamar girls etc is indexed for the limbo land site:
myanmar girls site:http://limboland.net/
See the smoking gun? This site links to yours and uses the exact keywords and is a doubtful site at best.
I would disavow this entire website.
Hope this helps.
Gr Daniel
-
Thanks for all the advice and help! I'm still digging, but I noticed that our PPC ads are surfacing on pages that are on SERPs for those particular terms. It may be some kind of wonky Analytics tracking.
-
Hate to quit but without any specifics it's not sensible to search more thorough and I would like to second the remark by Marks Ginsberg. But if you do I would love to take another look into it. Nothing like some could old investigating I always say.
-
I got nothing :D... sorry..
-
Unfortunately, no. Thank you for investigating though!
-
Does this query contain any site you might know?
-
Can you give us the URL of the site in question to take a peek ourselves - I'm know rather curious about what is going on here
-
Thanks, Keri! I did a fetch and the code looks fine. Still searching...
-
Thanks Mark and Daniel! I'll give it a go in OSE. I've been sticking to Analytics and GWT but it seems like it's time to branch out.
-
Thanks, Keri! I couldn't find anything via this method or good old fashioned search. It's a bit baffling that Analytics says it's coming from search when I can't find any results in search.
-
If your using WordPress I believe there is a way to exclude keywords so your site doesn't show up for certain keywords.
-
dns and domain hijack? Mm... Then I would advice to hire a security expert. Not a SEO.
-
That was actually the first thing I did when I was going to answer, but I didn't feel educated enough to answer the question. The correlation I could find is there is a company that publishes a news paper by the same name (the other companies name is an exact match on their domain name) that has written articles about Myanmar, but I don't know if that would influence anything since they do not have links on the page. If so, this is an area of SEO I haven't explored before.
-
The OP stated that these are keywords drawing traffic to the site, not referral traffic. Therefore, people are typing these keywords into a search engine and finding the site directly via the keywords.
It could be that the search engines are seeing a hacked version of the site that visitors don't see. Look at the landing pages for these keywords, then fetch those pages as Googlebot from Google Webmaster Tools.
-
yes but that's to easy and where is the fun in it:-) But could also fast become a case of chasing ghosts and shadows it it originates from websites with millions of pages?
-
So the traffic seems to be coming from search. I'd do a query in Bing and Google like:
site:mysite.com badkeyword
and see if you can find what pages are indexed with that bad keyword.
-
Following what Daniel suggested, you should check your links and mentions in Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer, and check if any anchor text that seems suspicious is popping up. I would start there.
You can also go to your analytics, and check the referring sites - do a glance at the domains, and see who is sending traffic to you, and do any of the domains sending traffic to you seem like a good target to check.
Moving further, you can also use Google advanced search operators to find out who is talking about you on the web - search for your brand name, with -site:yourbrand.com query as well. This may find someone talking about your brand but not on your site that you weren't expecting. But I would start with the backlink tools available to you and check there. It may be easier to run an export of your backlinks, and then filter for relevant anchor texts. I always prefer to do this type of analysis in Excel - much easier and quicker to do manually.
Good luck, and let us know what the culprit was in the end.
Sincerely,
Mark
-
Do suspicious domains show up in referring domains in the opensiteexplorer? Also if you connect the moz pro dash with Analytics it will start to pick up on landing pages receiving traffic. These would eventually show up as landing pages? But then they would somethimes need a keyword provided by Google. That could take a while.
And if not they must surely be logged on the webserver log files?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Would this be duplicate content or bad SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content. The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words. Here are the questions: Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief? Could this be beneficial as far as SEO? If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links? For example: For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries: <summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on. TIA</summary>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche1 -
I lost traffic from my website and the rankings also gone down... What should I do?
I've started working on a project recently (for 20 days) and it got average 1800 visitors per day and the ranking were seemed good. When I started that project, I saw that there were too many plugins installed. I removed unnecessary plugins and keep the importance ones. And I started modify some pages considering SEO perspective. Few days ago I created a backlink in reddit; from where I got way too much traffic in the site at the time and the server gone down. So I have to change the server. Now I see the drastic drop down in both ranking and the traffic. I am wondering if the ranking affected when I changed the server? Or Is there any other way to check why my ranking and traffic gone down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Is it a good idea to target a similar versions of a keyword?
Salute you all, I am optimizing a site for an attorney. I have done some good research and find the keyword difficulties. Some of my keywords are very similar was wondering is this a good idea and safe (white hat) or not? e.g. page title: 1) city immigration lawyer 2) city immigration attorney My main and first reason is to target all users. Since some will search under 'attorney' and some under 'Lawyer'. Secondly one is easier than the other. I appreciate any input from more experienced seo experts. Chris 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chris-tx0 -
Google says 404s don't cause ranking drops, but what about a lot of them
Hello, According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site. There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Keyword Duplication in the title
Hello, I read on this great SEO Blueprint Article here that you don't want to duplicate any words in the title tag, even one duplicate. But what if your branding and keywords both have the same word in it. For example, making the title here like this: NLP Training and Certification Center | NLP and Coaching Institute which is 66 characters by the way. Your thoughts on the duplicate word "NLP"?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Many Regional Pages: Bad for SEO?
Hello Moz-folks We are relatively well listed for "Edmonton web design." - the city we work out of. As an effort to reach out new clients, we created about 15 new pages targeting other cites in Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. Although we began to show up quite well in some of these regions, we have recently seen our rankings in Edmonton drop by a few spots. I'm wondering if setting up regional pages that have lots of keywords for that region can be detrimental to our overall rankings.Here is one example of a regional page: http://www.web3.ca/red-deer-web-design Thanks, Anton TWeb3 Marketing Inc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
SEO expert advice needed :)
So I have a niche site that I'm pretty sure has received an over-optimization penalty. This was about nine months ago or so. I haven’t really done much with the site since however I’d like the site to start appearing in the serps again, as I am adding fresh content and trying to create a really useful resource. I don't appear in the serps for any keywords related to my niche anymore. The site IS still indexed though. I didn't get any messages telling me that I was penalized so I don't think it was manual. I didn't use any spam or anything like that but I believe the penalty was probably for anchor text over-optimization and/or too many links to non-home page urls in comparison to the total amount of links the site had. I know removing these links or changing the anchor can help but the thing is the site only has about 30 total linking root domains pointed at it. So I was wondering if I could just add more links to other pages/the home page and add more links with varied anchors/naked urls to change the ratios and make it appear more natural. Now, would/could this fix my penalty? I am frustrated that I even received a penalty at all because much of my competition is ranking for fairly competitive terms with no real solid links pointed at their site and tons of comment spam. I have some relevant links/quality links so I am hoping that fixing this penalty could help put me back where I was before I got knocked into oblivion. There is one example of a competitor with a PR0 site getting good traffic and ranking for some nice keywords with only a bunch of self-set up web properties (and some comment spam) containing one only page for the purpose of linking back to their money site (blogspot, wordpress, weebly, mywebstarts ect). On top of that a lot of the sites I'm competing again are MFA, garbage sites that are written by non-native English speakers that offer zero value to the visitor. I need to start out ranking these spammers again. What should I do? thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmckiernan86_gmail.com0 -
Same template site same products but different content?
for the sake of this post I am selling lighters. I have 3 domains small-lighters.com medium-lighter.com large-lighters.com On all of the websites I have the same template same images etc and same products. The only difference is the way the content is worded described etc different bullet points. My domains are all strong keyword domains not spammy and bring in type in traffic. Is it ok to continue in this manner in your opinion?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dynamic080